Colten Begle
In 2008, the United States experienced a horrible economic crises because of events, like the Subprime Mortgage Crises, that eventually lead to The Great Recession. Many lives changed for the worse, but not Eric Faith’s. Due to the recession, Mr. Faith left his job and joined Stratum Consulting Partners, which changed his life forever. During this interview, Mr. Faith provided insight into the world of professional business communication by stressing the importance of professionalism, correct English, and respect in the business setting. In addition, he shared his personal experience in developing the skills required for professional communicators. Mr. Faith now works as the Vice President of Stratum Consulting Partners, which has grown from a $200,000 business in 2008 to a $3 million business in 2019. In this interview, a reader will learn the intricacies of professional writing, the importance of communication in the workplace, and how to conduct themselves in a work environment.
What is your professional history (include your timeline and roles)?
Eric: “I graduated from USI in 1994. They were building Toyota Plant around 95, or soon after that. I graduated with a bachelor of arts in communication. I had a business minor. I didn’t do any engineering stuff, which is what I’m doing now.The company that I worked for was called Premier Manufacturing. They were based out of Cincinnati, OH and they were owned by a company out of Germany. Dure industries are no longer here, but they built paint shops in all the big OEMs like Toyota, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, and Honda. What we did was take care of the components inside the paint shops like the robots, conveyors, lighting, and water filtration. My job out of school is what they call a maintenance planner, which means that I was supervising a bunch of maintenance technicians. Most of them have two years electrical engineering degrees or mechanical engineering degrees. I worked for Premier for twelve years. This was our first maintenance project we had, so we were responsible for not only the production side of Toyota, production meaning the robots and things that produced the car. We were also responsible for maintaining facility equipment. So like the air conditioners on the roof, HVACS, the boilers, chillers, all that stuff. I was responsible for setting up programs to maintain those and also make sure that our workforce had an adequate amount of work to justify their position, but also to extend the life of the equipment. If you have a pump that’s supposed to last twenty years you wanna do all the maintenance to extend the life, so we would set up programs to do that. So it was implementing a computerized maintenance system as well as managing people. So that was my first professional job. I then went on to move to Cincinnati for a couple years and worked at our corporate office, helping sell other maintenance opportunities within the automotive industry. We ended up selling a large fleet management contract for General Motors in the late 1990’s to 2000’s. We were supposed to maintain all of their fork trucks. They had 45 plants in North America and 65 in Mexico, so we set up systems to manage all that stuff. I ended up moving to Mexico for a couple years and was director of operations for Mexico facilities down there. So I bounced around our company for various opportunities. Our parent company was based in Stuckart, Germany, so I traveled a lot. Which wore me out. So I got to the point where I was just done mentally and physically. At that time I was thinking of starting my own company in setting up maintenance systems for manufacturing companies. My business partner, Clay Bush, had been doing some work for us at Premier. He went on to start Stratum Consulting, which is who I’m with now. So he started it, and we kept in touch. A couple years later I joined him and grew the company from there. Stratum was founded in 2003 and I joined Stratum Consulting Partners in 2006 formally and left Premier in 2006. We started getting into the public sector business which is waste water and water utilities, so we would set up maintenance programs for those entities. We got to be really good at energy analysis, so we could tell when equipment was going to fail because it would consume too much energy or not running as efficiently as it should. That became our niche. We also implement a software Infor EAM, and we focus on maintenance best practices. The software component is ease, and we are all fairly technical. We develop workflow charts and vizio diagrams, which shows customers how they should function from a maintenance perspective as well as materials management and the procurement side. We help educate them on how to do it correctly, and make the software adhere to that. Today Stratum has twenty employees, and we are scattered all throughout the county and have a couple of Canadian employees. We do a lot of other development with other software applications.”
What writing advice do you have for professional communicators?
Eric: “Proofread. Proofread. And then proofread again. I absolutely hate writing, but I write professional documents everyday. Whether it be an email to a prospective client, following up on some things that our employees did, or helping with the best practices. Which is a module within itself. One of our key elements in hiring an employee is that they have to be able to communicate without voice, so how they write is key. A lot of times we can determine how effective they are by their communication verbally. We don’t have employees that can’t wright effectively. We can’t afford to either. We deal with a lot of government contracts and a lot with the department of defense, so it’s heavy on the communication aspect. I guess on the writing side, I grew into it. I hated English as a kid, I hated English in college. I didn’t like writing papers at all, but it is a necessary evil. I always have a second set of eyes look at something, especially if it’s an important document like a contractual document. Also, never send anything off the cuff. That’s the worst thing to do.”
What is your one pet peeve when it comes to professional writing?
Eric: “The grammar side would be the easiest answer to that question. Misinterpreting the English vocabulary is confusing itself. The simple words like their, there, and they’re and other grammatically correct things. I mess up all the time, so I’m not perfect. If it’s a formal document, that would be a pet peeve. It also depends on how formal the relationship is with the person. It is a pet peeve, but I don’t come unglued when I see it. For instance, we submit an RFP response to Exact Sciences that is 150 to 200 pages in length. They have a lot of styles and formats to them, and we are really anal on making sure the headers are the same and correct formatting throughout the paper. Formatting is probably a more nit picky thing than the grammar side. We get accolades on how well our responses are, and I don’t know if it’s the style thing, but it’s appealing to the eye.”
What kind of business reports do you read and/or compose regularly?
Eric: “In our field, there’s a lot of maintenance specific magazines like Maintenance and Engineering and Plant Engineering is another. We subscribe to certain wall street type articles like Engineering News Record. Of course you have the Harvard Business Journals as well. I personally will listen to Ted Talks while traveling. So if I’m on a flight, I’ll listen to those.”
What are your writing suggestions to make that type of report successful?
Eric: “It takes me a while to actually write a report. I can’t just sit down and do it. A lot of times what I’ll do is brain dumps of things. I give more presentations than I actually write documents, but those presentations can go into a report or document. Sometimes they have, but I have to brain dump that information. I have apps on my phone that I will dictate too and save it for later. If I’m on a plane, I’ll take some of those small dictations that I have and create a paragraph around those thoughts. When the time comes to write a document, I’ll have those thoughts completed and copy and paste them into the document. It’s essentially an outline over time. Even when I’m sleeping at night I’ll wake up at two or three in the morning, think of something, and then write it down immediately on paper.”
What speaking advice do you have for professional communicators?
Eric: “Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen before speaking. I have a hard time doing, but I think you’re best approach to speaking and earning the respect of the folks listening to you is to listen to the people you are going to speak to. When I go into a new client, the last thing they want to here is how I’m going to stop world hunger and how they are going to walk on water by using our services. Any salesman can do that. When I go into a new site, I want to know what their pain points are. I want them to tell me. So I listen to that and I’ll hardly say anything during the first thirty minutes of our engagement. After the fact, I can take what they told me and speak to the things that are important to them.”
“For me speaking is easy, but listening is harder.”
Name one thing you wish you had known about business communication prior to your professional career?
Eric: “I would of payed a lot more attention to the writing side of communication. The thing that has helped me now is just age. I was horrible at English growing up, but it’s just so important. In any business opportunity, you learn as you go. College is a great thing, but you can only learn so much. College is strictly a discipline thing, you have to be disciplined to get through it. When you get to the real world, there’s a huge learning opportunity. I wish I would have paid attention to the writing elements in school. Also, presenting is very important.”
After assessing the Burning Glass list of Baseline Skills (2016), which skills not in the top 5 would you move into the top 5…and why?
Eric: “Problem solving is vital, we can’t go without it. Problem solving for sure. Project management is important because everything we do is project based, and it is the first thing we go through. Relationships is another important skill. All of our consultants have to be able to relate with our customers, which starts on a business level and can even move to a personal level. Which can be dangerous at times. We and what we do in developing business processes are very detail oriented, and I know for a fact that would be in the top five for us. Time management for us is important because we are a virtual company. Our employees work out of home if they are not on site. Time managements is a hard thing to learn if you haven’t done it before because your home is a distraction itself. You can run to the store when you want, watch TV, or run around the block. Also being a listener is important for the reasons I previously gave.”
What team skills do you feel young professionals need the most?
Eric: “First and foremost being able to disconnect and relate or associate with folks. I think we are all connected at the hip to our devices. It is such a distraction in meetings when everyone has their phone on their table. It can vibrate or cause some sort of distraction right in the middle of the meeting. I think being able to completely disconnect is important. Also, trying to learn as much as you can about the operating state of a company is important. I started in automotive, but I didn’t go to school to work in a manufacturing environment. You’ve got the knowledge and discipline after going through college, but you have no operating mindset of whatever career you are going into. So get your boots on, don’t be scared to get dirty, and actually get in the trenches with the folks who are doing a lot of the work. So for me in that case it was the technicians that I was supervising. I didn’t know how to work on any of this equipment that we were taking care of. I was not mechanical at all. So I took it upon myself to go out on the job. I would ask what are you doing to this motor, what are you doing to this pump, what are you doing to the conveyor, how hard is it. The only way for me to learn and how to plan this stuff correctly is to understand what they are going through. Once you get a degree, just keep going. When it’s time to get out, understand what the folks under you are doing. You put on your pants the same way you do. Try to live a day in the life of them to understand what they do. At the end of the day, that makes you a better professional.”
Key Takeaways
From this interview, one can see that Mr. Faith is competent in both his work and business communications. The information he provided was insightful to say the least. One key takeaway from his response is the importance of listening. He states that listening to an audience will help in earning their respect, which is essential for any type of business communication. Another key takeaway would be the concept of disconnecting. He states that members have their devices out in the open on a regular basis during meetings. This creates a distraction and can take away from the main points of the meeting. Overall, Mr. Faith stressed the importance of professionalism while writing any formal documents, respecting your fellow employees or employers, and understanding the complex operations that go on within a business. In addition, Mr. Faith’s comments on skills in the workplace show the importance of communication, project management, and time management. Many employers require certain skills from their employees, but sometimes these skills are conceived as less important. The Skills Gap for Baseline Skills figure demonstrates the gap between how often employers requested certain skills, and the importance of the skills according to O*NET job profiles.
After comparing Mr. Faith’s answers comments on skills in the workplace and the Skills Gap for Baseline Skills, one can see the skills he requires fall under both ends of the spectrum. For example, Mr. Faith stated that project management is important in his field of work. However, project management has a large skills gap for majority of the career areas. On the contrary, the skills gap for another important skill he requires, building effective relationships, is small. Mr. Faith believes that his consultants have to relate to the customers on a business level and sometimes even on a personal level.
Eric Faith Biography
Mr. Faith graduated from USI in 1994, with a bachelor of arts in communication. Joining Stratum Consulting Partners and helping create what it is today gave Mr. Faith a sense of accomplishment. Mr. Faith described it as a scary experience at first. He left the automotive industry before the economy tanked in 2008. He was in a great position at his company with great benefits, but he left to start Stratum Consulting Partners with his business partner Clay. They started out with only two employees, himself and Clay, and only a few contracts to share between the two. Now, they have twenty employees with over $3 million in sales revenue. The success from watching the company grow and going after larger contracts proved an amazing experience and monumentous accomplishment.
Eric Faith’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericfaith?trk=people-guest_profile-result-card_result-card_full-click
Stratum Consulting Partners: https://www.stratumcp.com/
